Introduction
Cutting Rhythms is about rhythm in film editing. It begins with the question: What can be said about the shaping of a film's rhythm in editing beyond saying “it's intuitive”? This question leads to an in-depth study of editors’ rhythmic creativity and intuition, the processes and tools editors work through to shape rhythms, and the functions of rhythm in film. Through this research Cutting Rhythms has carved out a number of theories about rhythm in film editing—what it is, how it is shaped, and what it is for. Case studies about creating rhythm in films edited by the author and examples of rhythm in a range of other films describe and illustrate practical applications of these theories.
Cutting Rhythms begins in Chapter 1 with an inquiry into intuition. What kinds of thinking and practice are editors referring to when they say the processes of creating rhythm are “intuitive”? Cutting Rhythms hypothesizes that the editor's intuition is an acquired body of knowledge with two sources—the rhythms of the world that the editor experiences and the rhythms of the editor's body that experiences them. These are the sources of the editor's somatic intelligence about rhythm, and they are also the triggers that activate the editor's creativity in cutting rhythms. This chapter describes the neurological and experiential connections between these two sources of rhythmic knowledge. It stresses the importance of physiology in the accrual of rhythmic knowledge and introduces ideas about thinking physically and using kinesthetic empathy creatively.
Chapter 2 of Cutting Rhythms argues that editing is a form of choreography in that editors manipulate the composition of moving images and sounds to shape a film's rhythms. It builds on the ideas in Chapter 1 that we perceive rhythm physically and develops the idea that the way we perceive rhythm is through perception of movement. The premise is that movement is what editors experience as a source of rhythmic knowledge, and it is also the material that editors work with in shaping a film's raw imagery and sounds into rhythms. This chapter looks at some of the ways in which choreographers work with movement and proposes that dance and dance-making processes might provide productive crafting information for the rhythm-making process in film editing.
The tools of this choreographic process of cutting rhythms are discussed in Chapter 3, which breaks down and describes the various editing operations being referred to with the terms “timing” and “pacing.” This chapter also introduces “trajectory phrasing,” a term devised to describe some of the key operations an editor performs that are not precisely covered by timing or pacing. The notion of trajectory phrasing draws on work done in dance theory to present ideas about the shaping of the direction and energy of movement phrases in film editing.
Chapter 4 looks at the purposes for which movement in film is shaped into rhythms. It describes the psychosomatic effect of rhythmic cycles of tension and release and the effect of synchronization that a film's rhythm can have on the rhythms of a spectator.
These four chapters cumulatively propose that: Rhythm in film editing is time, movement, and energy shaped by timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing for the purpose of creating cycles of tension and release.
Cutting Rhythms then applies its hypotheses about intuition, choreographic approaches, and the tools and purposes of rhythm to different types of rhythm that editors encounter. The terms “physical rhythm,” “emotional rhythm,” and “event rhythm” are offered as ways of describing kinds of rhythm and the variations of choreographic and intuitive approaches that editors might take to work with them.
Finally, Cutting Rhythms offers a series of chapters that address particular editing figures or problems. It starts with a chapter on style, looking at the rhythmic issues involved in cutting montage versus decoupage, and the kinds of decisions an editor makes about timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing when establishing and sustaining a style. Chapter 10 looks at devices such as parallel action, slow motion, and fast motion—things an editor can use to vary the rhythmic texture of a film—how they work best and when they descend into cliché. Finally, a chapter on common scenes looks at shaping two-handers and chases, with examples and case studies that provide instances of the principles in practice.
Cutting Rhythms is written to address editors and filmmakers who are learning their craft and more experienced practitioners who find their work benefits from discussion of their craft. Knowledge about rhythm helps students and editors to shape rhythms contrapuntally and maximize their material's rhythmic potential. It is also relevant to the screen studies scholar who is interested in the connection of theoretical ideas to practical methods and outcomes. Its purpose is to stimulate ways of thinking and talking about rhythm in film and to understand and deepen rhythmic creativity.
METHODOLOGY: THEORY
A survey of recent literature about editing1 shows that the question of rhythm in film editing is rarely addressed as a topic in and of itself. One notable exception is the work by Theo van Leeuwen, who notes in the introduction to Rhythmic Structure of the Film Text that:
There was a time when few works of film theory failed to address the role of rhythm in film . . . . More recently the study of rhythm in film has been all but abandoned. Since the publication of Mitry's Esthetique et Psychologie du Cinema (1963) little if any original thought has been contributed to the subject.2
Handbooks on editing craft sometimes supply rules about the rhythm-making tools of timing and pacing. These books and interviews with editors may also provide examples of rhythms from specific films, but say that there are no rules for editing rhythms and do not offer any substantial definitions of rhythmic creativity in film editing.
In his book The Technique of Film and Video Editing: Theory and Practice, Ken Dancyger describes rhythm as part of pace, and says, “The rhythm of a film seems to be an individual and intuitive matter.”3 The Technique of Film Editing, by Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, positions rhythm as an attribute of timing.4 In Film Art, Bordwell and Thompson describe a number of attributes of rhythm in their discussion of the “Rhythmic Relations between shot A and shot B,”5 but most of them are subsumed under the operations I will call pacing as in frequency of cuts. Bordwell and Thompson preface their remarks by saying that “cinematic rhythm as a whole derives not only from editing but from other film techniques as well.” Unlike their discussion, mine is an effort to consider cinematic rhythm as a whole inasmuch as the editor devises its final shape and form. In other words, although I am focused exclusively on editing operations, my question concerns their impact on the larger aspects of cinematic rhythm that they shape. I will define, therefore, a number of considerations the editor has in the affective shaping of cinematic rhythm, and frequency of cuts is only one of those operations.
Don Fairservice, author of Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice, gives a summary view of the literature available on rhythm in film editing when he says:
Any discussion about film editing will inevitably sooner or later raise the matter of rhythm. It tends to be used rather as a compendium word, a sort of catch-all which tends to obscure as much as it reveals about something that is difficult to define.6
Cutting Rhythms avoids putting forward any rules about rhythm or creativity in rhythm. Instead, it articulates some principles of rhythm in film editing as questions that editors, filmmakers, or film studies scholars can ask themselves and of their material in order to expand the scope and sensitivity of their rhythmic intuition. This approach, to articulate questions that editors can ask themselves or ask about their material, is a way of tying the theory proposed herein to the more pragmatic and pressured moments of practice. When one is working on a film, and someone in the edit suite says “it isn't right,” “it doesn't feel right,” or “the rhythm is off,” the ideas articulated herein about rhythm may present possibilities an editor can consider for herself to make it “right.”
Given this practical, craft-based purpose and my interest in connecting theory to practice, I have chosen, primarily, a cognitive approach to my discussion of the properties and processes involved in working with rhythm in film editing.
Cognitivism, as described by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, “seeks to understand human thought, emotion and action by appeal to processes of mental representation, naturalistic processes, and (some sense of) rational agency.”7
Cognitivists consider the physiological makeup of humans when they are studying how we understand and are affected by something like film. The underlying principle is that there are certain things hardwired into all human beings, things that are part of our makeup before we are shaped by our particular moment in time or upbringing, such as “the assumption of a three dimensional environment, the assumption that natural light falls from above, and so forth. These contingent universals make possible artistic conventions which seem natural because they accord with norms of human perception.”8
These assumptions are present in most editing practice—we do not spend our time in the editing suite wondering about the nature of being or the universe; rather, we are trying to shape an experience that resonates with the knowledge and beliefs many people hold. The ability to tap into those aspects of human experience that are physiological or deeply ingrained in perception and knowledge is an asset in trying to create resonant stories or experiences. So the discussions between working collaborators about a film project are generally grounded in this cognitive approach, and the cognitive approach will be used as a practical theorizing basis from which to work with the vocabulary in the filmmaking process in order to expand and refine it.
In particular, this book seeks to understand rhythm in film editing and the process of creating rhythm “through the physiological and cognitive systems ‘hard-wired’ into all human beings.”9 Cutting Rhythms makes numerous references to “physical thinking” when describing the cooperative functioning of known neurological processes with the rhythmic activity of the living breathing bodies of editors and spectators. By taking this approach, I follow, to some extent, the great Soviet director and montage theorist Sergei Eisenstein, who believed that “in its fullest manifestation, cognition becomes kinesthetic.”10 In other words, deep knowledge is not just something you know, but something you are and you feel. My argument that the body thinks about and creates a film's rhythms is made in practical terms that are intended to enhance access to this embodied knowledge.
In saying that the mind is physical and the body thinks, I am not making any comment about what else the mind may be, if anything. There is no revelation about consciousness or Consciousness, and no material versus extramaterial value judgment implied. I don't know what else the mind may be, or how else it may function, and I do not intend to address that question. My ideas rely on the evidence that the mind is a physiological entity as well as, despite, without regard for, and without implication of, anything else it may or may not be. And given that the mind is physical and the body thinks, I am developing an idea about cutting rhythms that looks at the way an editor shapes the flow of a film as a unified action of mind, emotion, and body.
The cognitive approach is effective in making my arguments accessible to practitioners; however, there is an anomaly in this approach for my particular topic. The study of rhythm is a study of something that is not, or is not primarily, apprehended cognitively. Dictionary definitions of the word “rhythm” frequently emphasize that “rhythm is a felt phenomenon.”11 This quality of being felt and created through feeling is a substantial thread in my overall inquiry. It is this quality that causes rhythmic creativity to be characterized as subjective and ineffable in writings on the craft of editing. It is also this quality that finds expansive, sympathetic discussion in the phenomenological and Deleuzian approaches to the study of cinema. For more information on this approach to understanding film, readers may find it interesting to go directly to the source and read Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, in which they will find a discussion of “the sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic”12 from another perspective.
However, through an analysis of the shaping of the “the sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective”13 into rhythms through various procedures and for particular purposes, Cutting Rhythms makes the case that, although rhythm is a felt phenomenon, it is not just felt. Creativity in rhythm and spectators’ expectations about rhythm are also learned, and the process of creating and learning rhythms can be described.
Cutting Rhythms appeals to knowledge in the discipline of neurology to explain the actual physical processes of experiencing and creating rhythm. In particular, it draws on recent theorizing by neurologists about the functioning of mirror neurons in the recognition of intentional movement. By describing the processes through which the brain apprehends rhythm (in part through recognition of intentional movement) and phenomenological theories of the ways that living bodies have kinesthetic empathy with movement they perceive, Cutting Rhythms develops a model of a thinking body, a body that gathers, stores, and retrieves information about rhythm and uses it strategically—in other words, a body that thinks, but does so primarily through a directly physical, experiential process.
I make use of work by the philosophers Deleuze and Henri Bergson and various scholars, drawing on the phenomenological study of film and dance within my thinking body model because their studies of perception of cinema, time, space, energy, and movement provide insights into the ways in which rhythm is perceived and the meanings of those perceptions. However, my objective is not to “create new concepts” or to “alter our modes of thinking about time and movement,”14 as Thomas E. Wartenburg and Angela Curran describe the work of Deleuze in their textbook The Philosophy of Film, but to engage in what Bordwell and Carroll describe as “problem driven research.”15 The problem is to find a way to describe the materials, processes, and purposes of rhythm and modes of physically thinking about rhythm so that rhythmic creativity in film editing can be understood and extended.
METHODOLOGY: PRACTICE
A substantial portion of my research into rhythm is necessarily practical. I have edited a number of short dramas, short and longer form documentaries, and the occasional educational or promotional video. Each of these has provided insights into the editing process. I have made observations and notes about each project I've worked on, so all of them have had an impact, in some way, on my research processes. By integrating theory with practice, testing my own and other's ideas against the practical experience of cutting to discover and articulate knowledge about rhythm, my intention has been to produce a set of ideas that are useful to practitioners and that may also provide useful data or ideas for other theoretical inquiries.
SOUND
Sound is an inestimably large force in the creation and perception of rhythms in film; therefore, the picture editor's work with sound must be accounted for in a discussion of rhythm. The standard process for editing, and the pathway that I learned, follows a timeline in which the raw footage is handed over to the editor (meaning the picture editor) for composition of final form, structure, and rhythm. Then she hands it over to the sound editor for sound design. This process may change, but for the time being, the implications of this process are that the editor does handle sound, inasmuch as she handles synchronized sound, and whatever sound effects and sound atmospheres are necessary to create a finished picture edit of the film, but the sound designer is the expert in sound.
As an editor, I almost always work with sound, but I only sometimes find or create sounds to make the pictures work. I usually use what is readily on hand that satisfies the criteria of timing and energy that I think are needed. I play around a bit with levels, a bit with various kinds of sound effects, and a lot with timing. But I leave the specifics of quality, source, direction, nuance, and layers to the sound team that will follow on from my work. Sound is a factor in the rhythms I create, but the art of sound design is a separate decision-making process that follows from and responds to the rhythms created in the picture edit.
In my discussion of rhythm, I include sound in my general statements about editing, and when I do, I mean sound as a picture editor works with it, not as a sound designer works with it. I distinguish sound as a specific element only when particularly noted. Otherwise, when I say, for example, “movement,” I mean movement in image and in sound; when I talk about energy, I mean energy in picture and sound, but only inasmuch as a picture editor would be expected to be manipulating sound.
MUSIC
Similarly, with regard to the use of music, the work discussed herein is that of a picture editor and not a composer. Picture editors don't create the music that is so substantially a part of the viewer's perception of rhythm in a finished film. However, unless a particular piece of music is written into the script, the composition of music generally follows the completion of a locked-off picture edit. Musical rhythms are, like sound rhythms, composed to underline, counterpoint, enhance, contradict, shade, and so forth, the story, structure, and rhythms created in picture editing. Music is, in fact, one of the things that make the topic of rhythm in picture editing so hard to pin down. When a film is finished, the music applies a seamless composition to images that are in actuality riddled with seams. Music, which is perceived as a flow rather than a series of individual notes, enhances the flow of images and ameliorates much of the disruptive potential of cutting, thereby making the cuts and the compositions of the cuts’ rhythms much harder to see.
Many editors use temporary, or “temp,” music while they are cutting. There are a few ways to do this, and some of these are more useful than others. One method of using temp music is to find pieces of music that match the mood the editor is trying to create and then lay them down and cut pictures to them. I do not usually do this for a number of reasons. The first of these is that it muddies my direct experience of the rhythms inherent in the images and performances. Furthermore, temp music applies a rhythm of something else that was already shaped to something I am trying to shape, thus blocking the potential for the rhythm I am creating to be its own unique solution to the problem at hand16.
Perhaps in an ideal world, a composer, sound designer, and editor would work side by side on constructing the final flow of the rhythm, the movement of sound and image, and the experience of the screen story. The impediments to this ideal are the usual: time and money. The process of cutting image first and then handing over to sound and music saves both time and money in that the composer and sound designer don't spend any time working on images or timings that may change or even be dropped. Less time wasted is certainly less money wasted. But the artistic possibilities of changing the workflow pathway to one that, though possibly more expensive, leads to a more balanced positioning of sound, music, and image in the production of film have yet to be fully explored.
Therefore, an editor has to look at yet another consideration when deciding whether to use temp music, which is that music is stronger than picture in its affect. To paraphrase Phillip Glass from a public forum on his work in Sydney in 2005, putting different pieces of music to images will change the images, but putting different images to a piece of music won't change the music.17 I avoid temp music whenever possible for all of the above reasons, and especially this one: a piece of temp music will make the flow of images seem to be working, which is a deception I cannot afford when trying to make the best possible edit.
There are two other ways of using temp music that should also be mentioned. One is to cut first and then lay in a particular piece of temp music. This is a form of communication between editor and composer, who may never meet on a tightly budgeted project. Editors can use temp music in this way to “show” composers what they mean or intend. To some extent this practice limits the composer's creativity and artistry. However, there are many edited projects in which deadlines and budgets supersede these concerns, so composers are happy to get this “help” and editors are glad to have an effective tool for communication. The other significant use of temp music is to sell the cut to the producers. If an editor lays in a compelling temp music track, it helps to inspire the producer's faith in the eventual results of the editing process by giving the roughly edited footage a feeling of having a polished rhythm. If temp music is being used in this way, then the best scenario is to have the composer come in and advise the editor on what music to use. This involves the composer in the creative editing process and gives him a chance at least to shape the impression a producer gets of the film toward the direction it will eventually take it when he composes the music.
Although both of these last two methods of applying temp music to a cut are useful for particular reasons, neither one really supports the editor's quest to find the best visual and kinesthetic flow of images and sounds in the editing process. Therefore, unless music is specifically mentioned, I do not include it herein as part of the discussion of the process of shaping rhythms in moving images.
MAKING DECISIONS
Cutting Rhythms breaks with the usual practice of referring to the director as the decision maker in the editing process, a practice found even in books about how to edit. These books consider the director the creative decision maker because the director is ultimately responsible for the decisions that are made. The director may give instruction as to what decisions should be made in the edit suite, but there is a great deal of variation among directors in the style and precision of these instructions. Furthermore, in the editing process, unless the director actually has his hands on the editing gear and is cutting the film himself, thousands of decisions are made by the editor before an edit of a whole film, a sequence or scene, or even an individual shot-to-shot relationship is presented to the director. The editor presents successive cuts, but not every possible choice that could be made, to the director for ratification. The director makes choice from among the variations offered to him by the editor. The editor makes choices from among millions of possible combinations of the material of what to present to the director.
Editor–director relations are a fascinating area of study, as they are delicate, complex, inspiring, frustrating, and very often nonverbal. It is not possible to overestimate their importance in the shaping of both the process and, of course, the eventual product of the edit. However, as they are not the central area of inquiry for this book, I have just added particularly relevant notes on the subject of working with directors on shaping rhythm in sidebars and reserved the larger topic of director–editor collaborations for another book!
ENDNOTES
1. In Editing: The Art of the Expressive, Valerie Orpen discusses various kinds of books available on editing, saying, “The existing literature on editing can be divided into three categories: textbooks or general studies on film, either solely on editing or with a section on editing; editor's handbooks; and interviews with editors, which include autobiographies, transcripts of lectures, essays, anthologies of interviews and individual interviews in periodicals.” See Orpen, V., Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive, p. 10. My literature survey includes texts in all three categories.
2. Van Leeuwen, T., “Rhythmic structure of the film text,” in Discourse and Communication: New Approaches to Analysis of Mass Media Discourse and Communication, p. 216.
3. Dancyger, K., The Technique of Film and Video Editing: Theory and Practice, pp. 307–315.
4. Reisz, K., and Millar, G., The Technique of Film Editing, pp. 246–247.
5. Bordwell, D., and Thompson, K., Film Art: An Introduction, pp. 278–280.
6. Fairservice, D., Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice, p. 273.
7. Bordwell, D., and Carroll, N., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, p. xvi.
8. Stam, R., Film Theory: An Introduction, p. 236.
9. Ibid.
10. Bordwell, D., The Cinema of Eisenstein, p. 125.
11. Brogan, T. V. F., “Rhythm,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 1068.
12. Deleuze, G., Cinema 2: The Time Image, p. 29.
13. Ibid.
14. Wartenburg, T. E., and Curran, A., The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings, p. 7.
15. Bordwell, D., and Carroll, N., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, p. xvii.
16. I am indebted to Robin de Crespigny, former lecturer in directing at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), and Edward Primrose, former Head of Screen Composition at AFTRS, for their discussions of temp music.
17. Phillip Glass spoke at Popcorn Taxi at the Valhalla Cinema in Glebe, Sydney, on January 9, 2005. A documentary record of the proceedings is available for the purposes of study or research through Popcorn Taxi at http://www.popcorntaxi.com.au.